Commentary on Australian and world events from a socialist and democratic viewpoint

Trump voters are Romney voters

At CT and just about everywhere else, there’s been lots of discussion about who is voting for Trump and why. This began during the Republican primaries, when it made sense to ask “what kind of Republican would prefer Trump to Bush, Cruz etc?”.

This is well known, but few people seem to have drawn the obvious conclusion*. With marginal changes (I’ll discuss these below), the people who are voting for Trump now voted for Romney four years ago, and for Bush before that.

This makes nonsense of much of the discussion of Trump voters as the dispossessed, protesting against globalisation, predatory capitalism and the destruction of American manufacturing. Conversely, it turns out that the discussion of Romney’s “dog whistle” appeals to racism was misconceived. Replacing the dog whistle with a bullhorn has turned out to be no problem for the great majority of those who voted for Romney.

What matters to Romney/Trump voters is what Romney and Trump have in common. Trivially, they have both been nominated by the Republican party and their supporters are Republican partisans. But that’s a bit like saying that opium makes you sleepy because of its dormitive quality. People are Republican partisans because they agree with the core elements of the Republican position: white Christianist identity politics, opposition to (non-white) immigration, and anti-poor, anti-union economic and social policies. What Trump has done is to show that some things previously thought to be core Republican commitments (free trade, for example) are actually peripheral.

Of course, the overlap is not 100 per cent. The (small) group of Republicans who aren’t voting for Trump is different from the (also small) group who didn’t vote for Romney: the never-Trumpers are mostly women and college graduates, while the anti-Romney Repubs presumably included some stereotypical Trump voters (with the qualification that they identified as Republicans well before Trump came along).

In addition, it’s necessary to take account of demographic changes, newly registered voters, differences in turnout and switches in party affiliation. Demographic changes have mostly favored the Democrats. Trump has claimed to be driving new registrations, but I’ve seem no evidence of this. Republicans have had a net benefit from switchers, but that’s mostly a continuation/completion of the long migration of Southern white nationlists away from the Democratic party.

Overall, though, the problem is simple. If you want to explain Trump’s support base, you need to start from the fact that he shares it with Romney and Bush.

* Corey here at CT and elsewhere has probably been the most consistent exponent of the view that Trump is a traditional Republican, in the line of Goldwater and Reagan. I broadly agree, though I’d put more stress on new developments over the past 20 years or so. Trump’s complete disregard for truth, norms of decency and so on, is an extrapolation of a process that’s been going on for quite a while, at the popular level with Fox News, birtherism and so on and in the Republican intellectual apparatus with climate denial, zombie economics and attacks on “political correctness”.

Having the internet does not preclude the Trumpites holding the houses of Congress. From this issues forth appointments to the Supreme Court. The hope of the break on the conservative hold on the Supreme Court came with the death of Antonin Scalia, the hope was that a Clinton government would redress the ideological imbalance there, as J-D appears to recognise.

Instead we will witnesses silliness of a magnitude and intensity that would make Abbott’s PM-ship seem rational by comparison.

But whatever Trump or the Repubs do, it won’t make the people who voted for them happy.

He will fail to improve their lives except for the brief flashes of satisfaction some of them feel when other people they don’t like suffer because of something they instigated like if he makes abortion illegal. The lovely Charlene aka Phillipa would be happy with that bit of fascism but the people who voted hoping for a better and more prosperous world will be very disappointed with the solutions he offers when they don’t work.

Julie, JD.. this is the whole thing, it is unchartered territory. We know the killing is offshored, eg the mid east, is there a chance in a nation that has woken up to the power of high level weaponry and the idea of militias really constrains minorities more severely in future than at present. I remember Margaret Attwood did a dystopic novel called “Handmaids Tale”involving an emerging theocracy in a collapsing, dumbed down society.

A plutocrat with inherited wealth speaks for the under-employed and unemployed men, the women who bounced off of the glass ceiling, the undeclared immigrants? Strange days are these.

Actually, it is a salutary statement that if the left side of politics wants to be relevant, they need to do some serious thinking about how to assist the sinking class. Platitudes no longer suffice, if indeed they ever did.

..if the left side of politics wants to be relevant, they need to do some serious thinking about how to assist the sinking class..

What a novel idea!

Again, here we have President Trump precisely because the “left” side of politics has no idea what that even means. And because “they” have been able to count – until recently – on a very large slice of the electorate to vote for them no matter what they do.

“Lesser-Evilism” will keep going and giving these results until enough of the “left” say: No!

A few weeks ago Michael Moore put out a nauseating film called ‘Trumpland’ which got massive MSM exposure and consisted of a 70 minute monologue of him telling the universe how excellent Hillary Clinton really is.

Today he has the gall to tell the world (on facebook):

Morning After To-Do List:

1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.

2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must “heal the divide” and “come together.” They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.

3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn’t wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that’s about to begin.

4. Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked”. What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.

5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).

Let’s try to get this all done by noon today.
— Michael Moore

The idea seems to be keeping the pitch-forks pointing in the right direction by telling ‘stupid’ people that they are too stupid to work out where their anger should be directed.

What I do know is that a majority of voters with annual incomes below $50,000 voted Democrat; that if voters with annual incomes below $50,000 had decided the election, they would have given it to Clinton; that Trump owes his victory to voters with annual incomes above $50,000.

I do like Margaret Attwood – the best one was Cats Eye, I think that is the title, in which she describes how cruel and bullying girls can be to one who is different – resonated strongly with me but I couldn’t take the Handmaids Tale seriously.

And I’m really sure that the people I live among are not dumb – they have been dumbed down and psychologically twisted to admire all the things that are bad for them and for a decent society.

But they are working it out. I can see the changes happening before my eyes. They are listening to their children who have the internet and they are working things out about the rich and the idea that these people deserve their wealth and we poor people should be ashamed of ourselves for being leaners and for being envious.

Listen to “The Money” on RN this morning and hear evidence that people are changing their opinion of the rich being deserving of their wealth. This is also going to create less stupidity in my neighbours who are not stupid at all, but they are ignorant and have been forced to believe in things like meritocracy, that have made them stupid.

Perhaps it is living in a food growing area where I know and like my rwnj neighbours that is the reason I can see that we can and will change our society for the better. The reaction when I say not to worry because this is just end stage capitalism and Marx predicted that true socialism will follow, is speechlessness and not anger at the very idea of Marx. Maybe they think I mean Groucho?

I’ve deleted this. Everyone please be more civil. I haven’t got time to check the entire thread, so I don’t care who started it, and will ban anyone who complains about my ruling or continues with insulting langauge – JQ

My view is that there is sometimes a sanctimonious and hypocritical element to the modern left, which has made enemies of people who should have been friends. For example, I know people who (i) happily use the phrase ‘white trash’, and (ii) throw accusations of racism around like confetti.

I am not saying that we should do less to combat racism, sexism, homophobia etc. But I do think that our efforts have often had a very unpleasant and counterproductive tone. So much so that it is easy to think that for some, being holier-than-thou is the real goal and advocacy is merely a façade (to be clear I am not talking about this blog or anybody on it).

Of course most lefties are not like this at all, in the same way that most Trumpkins are not hateful bigots. But like racist Trumpkins, there are enough of these people, and their voices are often the loudest, such that we are easily misunderstood.